


Goodbye Vigils

by Ramenlover



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, I did Kerry dirty in my other fic, I'M SO SORRY KERRY I LOVE YOU, Johnny lives ending, May have forgotten to do his sidequests, booze and remembering, like super minor spoilers for Panam's ending, not beta read because people are spending time with their family's on christmas or something, sad boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28330239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ramenlover/pseuds/Ramenlover
Summary: Johnny goes to see Kerry before he heads out of town forever, figures he owes him an explanation.
Relationships: Johnny Silverhand & Female V, Kerry Eurodyne & Johnny Silverhand
Comments: 8
Kudos: 77





	Goodbye Vigils

**Author's Note:**

> This fic delves into the backstory I made up for my V!! This probably won't be what you had in mind for yours!!
> 
> It's possible to read this as a sequel to [Goodbye Proxies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28214040) but not necessarily and doesn't require you to read that one first

Kerry was playing music which was a good sign. In the past, Johnny had learned that it was always easier to deal with a Kerry who was creating than a Kerry who was stuck in some rut or other. And there’d been a  _ lot _ of ruts. There was a chance this could lead to another but… No. No, he didn’t think so. After everything with the Us Cracks and that little display on the Seamurai (he still couldn’t get over that fucking name), Kerry genuinely seemed to be in a better place. Hopefully, a good enough place to deal with this.

Patting one of the security droids on the chest, Johnny let himself in through the backdoor. The music was coming from upstairs, stopping and starting every few chords in the familiar process of trying to write a song down. Improvising always felt great, when the music flowed out from some unseen place where it all was so much smoother and easier. Then you had to try and fix it place. Write it down so the record label could record it, label it all. These days he suspected they had fancy tech that could easily read and record the notes from one playing but maybe Kerry was doing things the old fashioned way.

Johnny swiped a drink on the way up the stairs and stopped just shy of the top, listening. It was similar to the one from the boat. The natural evolution of the tune, one that he could almost hear being layered over with drums, something that started slow but ramped up; a bass line, low but complex, falling when the guitar rose and vice versa. Room for a keyboard there too, that’d work best harmonising with the vocals maybe? But what for the voice? There was energy in the music but it wasn’t angry, something else… It took him a full thirty second to realise the music had stopped and that Kerry was carefully assessing him.

“Fucking uncanny,” Kerry laughed, breaking the silence. “Exact expression you used to have when you zoned out while playing.”

“Different hardware, same soft,” Johnny said, raising a hand in mock surrender. “Know what you’re doing with that yet?”

Kerry placed the guitar down on the table and knocked back another drink. He was dressed in loose leather pants and a mostly unbuttoned shirt which was better than before so Johnny took it as a sign this was going to be okay.

Without waiting for invitation, Johnny stepped over the back of the coach and planted himself there. “You spoken to Rogue?”

There was an almost imperceptible stillness to Kerry’s face. He placed the glass back down, a little too deliberately. “She said you were leaving town. Didn’t say when though.”

“She say why?”

“Nope. Said it was better if you told me.” He paused and then added, “but that you might not have the guts.” There was a confused half-smile to Kerry’s face. “It’s got something to do with Arasaka, right? That shit is  _ everywhere _ . Second I saw it, I knew. I  _ knew _ . I said, ‘that’s Johnny and V right there, that’s them fucking shit up, sticking it to the corps’. You leaving with the nomads, right? That’s why? Did V give you wheel to say goodbye?” The smile had grown into a full grin. “You let her know I wanna say goodbye to her too, right? She’s a good kid. Good friend.”

Shit. He shouldn’t have left it this long. Should have gone to Kerry first instead of waiting. But he’d had that debt. The debt to V, the debt to tie her life up first. Of course, he’d completely fucking forgotten that Kerry now consisted of part of her life too. 

“Ker,” he began and knew immediately his voice was too soft. Shit. Shit shit shit. “V… she’s…” This should be getting easier. “She’s gone.”

The smile slipped. “What?”

This should be so much easier.

Closing his eyes, Johnny rested his face on his knuckles. “Why couldn’t Rogue have just told you? Why the fuck do I have to do this every fucking time? It fucking hurts. And talking about it makes it hurt more and she knew that and-” He cut himself off. “V sacrificed herself for me. She died so I could live and I’ve spent the last weeks dealing with everything she left behind and I can’t fucking handle. So yeah, she’s fucking dead. Okay?”

Silence. The anger faded quickly. It rarely stayed anymore; gone was the old boiling sea of rage that bubbled over at the slightest provocation and stayed that way far, far longer than was healthy. But it wasn’t V’s temper either. Cold and dangerous, calculating and sharp, like some weird iceberg floating through the usually warm waters that had been her. No, this was like a faulty fuse. Sparking to life but not going anywhere. Cos in the end, who was there to be mad at? He couldn’t be mad at V because- because he couldn’t be mad at V. He could be angry at himself but, in the end it, always circled in his head. If he hated himself for having to do this then he had to start hating V’s decision and he couldn’t- He couldn’t even hate Night City. Both of them had loved it too much, loved it from the glitter of the highest skyscraper window to the filth embedded in the lowest pavement.

In the end, he’d settled on hating Arasaka but that was an old anger that didn’t have the same heat it had once had. Just another thing added to the list of what it had taken from him.

“Fuck.” Kerry was eloquent as he ever was. “Fuck,” he said again, more emphatically this time. Johnny cracked open an eye to see him emptying a glass and then immediately refilling it and emptying it again. He slammed both down on the table and leaned forward, eyes way too bright for the situation. “So what’s the plan?”

“What?”

“You’re bringing her back, right? That’s why you came to me? What need my connections? Money? Oh, Rogue spreading the news of you leaving so you can move secret like?” Surely even that booze much wasn’t enough to have Kerry drunk already. Unless he’d slipped a handful of pills before Johnny arrived in which case, was Kerry even going to remember this conversation in the morning?

“She died,” Johnny said and Kerry shrugged.

“So did you.”

“Not like-” Balling his hands into fists, he took a deep breath. “Listen to me. I am not fucking with you. I am not recruiting you. V is dead. Actually dead. There’s no grand plan, no fucking rescue mission. Because I killed her, Kerry. The second my shard entered her brain, I signed her goddamn death warrant. I did that. Sure, Araska had a fucking hand in it but I killed her and in the end, she chose to let me live instead of trying to cling to the handful of months I’d left her!”

Fuck.

Fuck everything about this!

Kerry was on his feet. He tried to pour himself another drink but his fingers couldn’t hold the glass and it shattered on the ground. Both of them stared at the broken glass, frozen in place. The anger passed. The tension subsided.

Johnny unclenched his fists, resting his palms against his cheeks. “Oh, V,” he whispered.

“She told me I was maturing,” Kerry said. “I told her I was done with mayhem and shady schemes and all that shit.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at the ceiling. “What’d she say if she saw us like this?”

“She’d probably tell us to get our big boy pants on and stop whining,” Johnny said. “Then she’d listen to us spill our guts with that- that face of hers. I couldn’t ever see it, ya know? Like I could feel it when we talked but-”

“It was a real powerful face,” Kerry said after a moment. His eyes glowed briefly blue and a cleaning unit trundled out from a compartment in the wall to clear up the broken glass. “Like, made you wanna just dump all life’s problems at her feet and let her clear them up for you cos you knew she could do it and would if you asked her too.”

“Think she spent more time cleaning up people’s problems than facing hers.” Johnny rescued the bottle Kerry had managed to not smash and found them some new glasses. “Even when she was a kid, she was pulling bullets out of her big brother’s arm.”

Kerry stared at the new drink then gave a humourless laugh. “Just fuckin’ realised, I didn’t even know she had a brother. I didn’t know anything about her.”

“You knew enough,” he said. “You knew the shit that mattered.”

Sipping at the drink instead of downing it, Kerry stared off into the middle distance. “Tell me about her.”

Well that Johnny could do in spades. “Heywood kid, born and raised. Her daddy worked at a repair shop, usually broken guns but he was their one good techie. Mom did low-level net security, decent work but not the kinda stuff you made good money on outside of the corps. Her brother, he joined 6th Street when he was fifteen and she was nine. Her parents worked all the time so he used to take her along with him, they used to let her sit in the driver’s seat at the Auto-shop while they talked business. Taught her how to repair engines and even let her shoot bottles for fun. Sometimes they left her there alone while they got shit done. She had her dad’s talent for making shit and she used to just go nuts. Then there was- Autoshop got raided by scavs while there was basically no one there, she hid and was fine but… Her brother couldn’t stand the guilt. Came clean. Mom and pops freaked. Turned into a row so loud it made the glasses shake.” Unconsciously, he raised his hands towards his ears, lost in her memories, remembering what it’d been like to be her, sitting on the balcony of their shitty apartment with her hands over her ears trying not to listen. “Turfed him out and her daddy started taking her to work with him instead.”

“She told me she used to work backstage for gigs,” Kerry said, he was lying across the couch, holding his guitar against his chest as he listened.

“I remember,” Johnny said absently. “When she was like sixteen? Seventeen? She wanted a bike but her folks had fuck all so she started working every job she could get. Started doing repair work for 6th Street and the Valentinos on the DL.” He stared down at his hands, her hands, saw the callouses she’d built up over the years; the scars across her knuckles from when she a light fitting had given way while she was fixing it; the one across her thumb that she’d gotten from a broken SMG spring, it’d taken her two hours to notice it and by that point there’d been blood all across her desk. “Brother got popped when she was nineteen, his chooms came to her, asked for help getting revenge and she’d agreed. Didn’t tell her parents, knew it’d break their hearts. Not that it mattered. Few years later, she’s out on a job one night and she gets a call from her mom. Home invasion, 6th street nowhere in sight. They were dead by the time she got there. Two bullets in her daddy’s head, one in her mom’s neck. Left for Atlanta six months later, no intention of coming back.” Oh, if only she hadn’t come back.

Maybe things’d be different. Maybe Johnny’s shard woulda been stolen on a different night, kept nice and safe in that container, delivered to the voodoo boys and used to find Alt. No collateral. No sacrifices.

He talked more, about how things had gone to shit in Atlanta too, how she’d found her way back here, found her way to Jackie. Found her way to Johnny. Then he and Kerry drank, a toast, they said, to V.

“Before you leave,” Kerry said as the sky shifted from day to night. Fuck how long had he been talking? “Wanna help me write one more song? For her?”

Johnny actually smiled then. “For V,” he agreed.

They got to work.


End file.
